Many people are familiar with the "personals" section of many newspapers. The personals are advertisements placed by people who would like to meet other people with similar likes and interests. People place personal advertisements in newspapers to find activity partners to make new friends, to make acquaintances or to find people with whom intimate relationships may be formed.
As a result of the popularity of personals advertisements in newspapers, and the advent of the Internet's World Wide Web, systems for providing personals advertisements on networked computer systems have appeared. These personals systems may be made available to the public through software application programs referred to as Web browsers which are used to locate resources on the World Wide Web.
To date, however, these systems for providing personals on computer networks consist largely of the same information that is available in the newspaper advertisements. That is, the computerized personals merely mimic the newspaper advertisements. Conventional systems for providing personals advertisements on computer networks fail to utilize the added capabilities computers provide over newspapers. For example, different forms of personal information content, such as voice or image content may be provided on demand to a user via a personal computer coupled to a computer network. Conventional systems for providing personals advertisements on computer networks similarly fail to take advantage of the available resources and features of such networks. For example, conventional systems fail to provide communications between the persons placing the personals advertisements, and fail to effectively utilize the ability to restrict access to such information or communications.
Internet and other network service providers sometimes provide users with the ability to generate user-defined sites or pages on the World Wide Web. A user defined page allows users to convey information to the public by displaying text, images, movies, sounds and other multimedia information on such pages. The ability to convey information on such pages, however, often requires that the user be able to generate the page using a programming language or other protocol such as Hypertext Markup Language ("HTML"). One problem with this approach to providing user defined pages, however, is that many users of personals are not familiar with such languages.
Also, these World Wide Web pages provide no privacy. World Wide Web pages are generally available to any user of the Internet. Since the Internet allows access by users world-wide, a relatively large number of Internet users exist. The number of persons utilizing the Internet is generally believed to be at least in the tens of millions. With such a large number of users, it is desirable to restrict access to information on some pages or even to restrict access to some pages.
Another problem with World Wide Web pages is that it can be difficult to direct a desired audience to a particular page. The owner of such a page must simply hope that the desired audience, out of some tens of millions of users, finds the page.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a secure method for providing personal information in a network environment which makes use of the multimedia opportunities available on such a medium, and makes the information available in a private way, i.e., only to those people that the person providing the information wishes to see the information.